[lit-ideas] Re: Science as Aesthetics?
- From: Paul Stone <pastone@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Thu, 14 May 2009 10:01:47 -0400
On Wed, May 13, 2009 at 10:27 PM, John McCreery <john.mccreery@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> Are we really in a position to judge whether the time has been wasted?
> Perhaps a little perspective is in order.
But 'string theory' or whatever they call it this week is becoming
increasingly inelegant. It flies in the face of the law of parsimony.
The original idea, really just a re-structuring of Leibniz's monad
idea, is elegant (if true). But they've made it all so complicated and
impossible to test that it is the exact opposite of elegant.
Also, you bring up Brahe, Kepler, Copernicus, Galileo etc. All good
men, good math guys, great discovers, all also very wrong in huge
ways. Not time wasted. They never really knew what they were doing in
the grand scheme of things and there was so much to still discover.
It's all a matter of degree. Newton had a WHOLE lot figured out, but
he had a few constants wrong and ignored (or didn't understand or
think of) relativity. Then Einstein/Podolsky/Rosen (EPR paradox)
"proved" that QM wasn't complete. Then came Bell who had a few ideas
of his own. And so it has gone as we get 'closer'.
But the 'unified field theory' claims to be the Mother of all theories
and bring us 'THE TRUTH'. That's an elegant suggestion, but that's
about as far as I'll grant it. I'm pretty sure we're not going to see
a TOE in my life time that bears any fruit to speak of -- and by
making up conjectures about impossible to imagine stuff like
Calabi–Yau manifolds and suchlike don't make things elegant. The
mathematicians can't even picture that, so how is anyone else supposed
to?
Brian Greene wrote two very good books about these topics (the
elegant universe and the fabric of the cosmos) whose reading is a bit
like watching the show "Lost" -- 30 questions arise for every
"statement" he makes. Again, all interesting stuff, but true? These
books seem like more of a scientist who has spent the past 22 years of
his life devoted to fitting the universe and its laws so that it fits
into the 'elegant' rubric than as a means to explain anything about
what it is really. Like I say, it's fascinating to follow along with,
and I'm far from "harrumphing" against it. In more than 35 years since
it really took hold, it has yielded ZERO testable results. It's
aesthetically pleasing to imagine that it's true, but scientifically,
a failure. At most, it has necessitated the invention of new
mathematical puzzles to solve, but that's just playing with an erector
set with unlimited pieces.
p
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